The Elder Scrolls Online Wants You, Right Now-ish

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SWTOR got it wrong – oh so very wrong – but here we are once again, looking at a mega-bucks MMO that could make World of Warcraft wriggle around uncomfortably, like it’s wearing underwear a size too small. Like it or not, Skyrim is a game which crossed to The Other Side, that strange and terrifying world of people who play games but don’t follow gaming. Y’know, Normals. As such, Bethesda’s upcoming massively multiplayer monster-stabber The Elder Scrolls Online has at least a chance at a very big audience, not purely the MMO-educated. We shall see!

Today’s big news, though, is that Bethesda have opened up beta sign-ups for TESO, and they have a fancy-pants new trailer too. Guess where I’ve put that?
Basically the trailer is a group of Tamriel super-friends (presumably one from each of the game’s main factions) duffing up some baddies in a HI-OCTANE Peter Jackson movie sort of way, all meeting up then looking like they’d quite like to murder each other. There’s some pretty impressive CGI facial work in there too:

BIFF, etc.

As for beta sign-ups, well- you’ll be wanting to go here to do that. “Timing and details of the start of playtests will be provided at a later date to those who register”, and only “selected” registrants will find themselves approved. I wouldn’t mind being selected: I know TESO appears to be doing things very differently to all previous Elder Scrolls games and that’s caused some controversy among the faithful, but I’d very much like to make my own judgement from experience.

Lest ye forget, here’s what the game proper looks like:

Release date-wise, all we have is ‘2013’ still – which at least would imply beta-time mightn’t be too far off.

150 Comments

Looks like I’m going to be the only one to say I’m positively stoked about this release. I can understand if people are hesitant to play because they’ve already burned out on the MMO experience through other games and played for years. Me, personally, I have avoided all MMORPGs for a variety of reasons, and I won’t play unless I think its truly worth it. There are a lot of things I’ve heard and seen that make me think this is worth it, because no matter how much of a “clone of WoW ” or whatever else people think about it, the newer the release the newer the technology, the better the worlds, the better the graphics, etc. Things like that is something I look forward to with each new game release from a company I enjoy. Honestly, the only way I can see this going south is if it tries to bleed us dry of money, and though I love Bethesda and the Elder Scrolls, it’s still a possibility. Either way, it’s pretty simple, if you don’t want to play it, don’t, but you can’t sit there and decide that it’s going to be this or that without actually playing it. Want to make a snarky and negative opinion about it? Play the beta, THEN by all means, go ahead and say what you will. I’ll personally give this a chance because to me, it looks fantastic.